Modern electronics, such as smart phones, cell phones, digital cameras, personal digital assistants, location based services devices, and enterprise class appliances, are packing more integrated circuits into an ever shrinking physical space with expectations for decreasing cost. As more functions are packed into the integrated circuits and more integrated circuits into the package, integrated circuit packages must continue to provide a mechanism for making electrical interconnection between the integrated circuit die and the leads that are utilized to make electrical interconnections to circuits, power, and ground external to the integrated circuit die. In the early stages of integrated circuit development, there were relatively few connections between the integrated circuit die and the external circuitry.
Increased miniaturization of components, greater packaging density of integrated circuits (“ICs”), higher performance, and lower cost are ongoing goals of the computer industry. Semiconductor package structures continue to advance toward miniaturization, to increase the density of the components that are packaged therein while decreasing the sizes of the products that are made therefrom. This is in response to continually increasing demands on information and communication products for ever-reduced sizes, thicknesses, and costs, along with ever-increasing performance. Different challenges arise from increased functionality integration and miniaturization.
Thus, a need still remains for an integrated circuit packaging system including high input/output density, low cost, and improved reliability. In view of the ever-increasing need to increase density of integrated circuits and particularly portable electronic products, it is increasingly critical that answers be found to these problems. In view of the ever-increasing commercial competitive pressures, along with growing consumer expectations and the diminishing opportunities for meaningful product differentiation in the marketplace, it is critical that answers be found for these problems. Additionally, the need to reduce costs, improve efficiencies and performance, and meet competitive pressures adds an even greater urgency to the critical necessity for finding answers to these problems.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.